The whole town's talkin' about the Barr guy. And, of course, most of the town hates him. It's just the way Washington is. Quote of the day from Matthew Continetti in the Washington Free Beacon:

I can't think of a better illustration of our partisan divide than the reactions to Attorney General William Barr's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Democrats are furious at Barr's defense of his rollout of the Mueller report and his assertions of executive power. Some Democrats want Barr to resign, others want him to be impeached, and Nancy Pelosi says he's guilty of lying to Congress. Republicans have found a hero.

Barr is the new Dick Cheney: a stocky, bespectacled, confrontational, blunt, intelligent, unapologetically conservative, experienced, and high-powered official who believes in and fights for the office of the president. Just as Democrats loathed Cheney as a bugaboo manipulating President George W. Bush to further the interests of Halliburton, they attack Barr as a dishonest factotum of President Trump's. The qualities that drove Democrats batty over Cheney—his inscrutability, his cleverness, his asperity, and above all his success—make them incensed about Barr. These happen to be qualities Republicans find appealing.

What's behind conservative support for Cheney and Barr is their lack of embarrassment. Most Washingtonians, no matter their party, find it important to be held in esteem by the city's tastemakers, who are overwhelmingly liberal. Not these two. The classic Cheney moment was his 2004 exchange with Pat Leahy on the Senate floor. Cheney complained that Leahy had called him a war profiteer. Leahy responded that Cheney had said he was a bad Catholic. So Cheney ended the conversation by telling Leahy to perform a physically impossible four-letter act. "You'd be surprised at how many people liked that," Cheney recollected in a 2010 interview. "It's sort of the best thing I ever did." He's selling himself short.